Plankton

"It's become painfully obvious. I can deny it no longer! I am small."

My friend laughs when I finish my joke, slapping her knee. I've always wondered what she can see when she looks at me. She easily towers over me (most people do), so she can probably see me at an angle I've never seen myself at before. How not fat I am, even though I think I am but I am comparing myself to how wide the sink is and she is looking at how little of the bench we are sitting on takes up and how small my knees and thighs are compared to hers. She can see my eyes at an angle I can't since I have to look through such dirty glasses, and if my glasses are off, I can't see anything. She sees my skin shade and not the white lines snaking between skin cells that I can since I'm so close to my arms.

She knows that I do not like my physical appearance as do many others. if my mother is lucky when I'm recording videos for her, I will move so she can see a tift of my long-untwisted black hair and maybe my scabbed forehead or the rims of my black glasses. If my friend is lucky, he'll see my long white fingernails pointing out random shit in my room as the phone is always facign the ceiling since I wasn't wearing appropriate clothes that night. Even when I was, I was afraid to show my face when I was singing because he could see how crooked my teeth are when I smile and that my face is dotted with long gone pimple scars. It doesn't seem pretty to me, though I still would have blushed if he said it was.

I have my dad's skin and his face, as he loves to point out when we would go through the photo album as a family (without my brother since he's at that age wehre he stays in his room all the time and is told to wash his hands all the time). My dad would marvel at how tall I've gotten (though I am STILL SHORT) since he can remember when I would wander around the house and could easily walk under the table and get lost behind the couch. We would laugh, eliciting a deep annoyed sigh from my dog, who is trying to sleep on my thighs (which he loves).

After too long, he'll stretch, pressing little dtrong paws into my legs and sit up, smelling the varying smells as he rises. He smells my arm, looks curiously at the tattoo on my arm, and walks to his bed. Halfway asleep, his little tail wags at my laughter, as he seems to love it most of all. I watch it as I try to think of how I look, because I can still only see the negative after all of this.